Whats up with the "mass revelation theory"? (Were there lots of people on Mt. Sinai that witnessed some sort of revelation or not?)

Akusai www

Despite your overwhelming abundance of the letter “e,” I don’t really feel it necessary to “use facts,” at least in the sense of verified evidence for mundane biblical transmission, of which there is a lot.

I will, instead, pose to you a few questions on which I feel you should think long and hard.

If there was no mass revelation, how was knowledge of the Greek gods passed down from generation to generation?

If Gabriel didn’t visit Muhammad, how did the Most Holy Koran get passed down from generation to generation?

If there was no angel Moroni, how did the Book of Mormon get passed from generation to generation?

If there was no spiritual awakening, how did knowledge of the various gods and nature spirits of the Native Americans get passed down from generation to generation?

I could go on like this, but I think I’ve made my point.

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George Locke

How can the Judeo-Christian mythology be passed down if it isn’t the truth?

Nobody would say that any faith that has survived the test of time must be correct. There are many religious faiths that have survived the test of time, and not all of them can be right.

The question of why some religions survive while others do not is a very interesting one, but don’t go overboard. There must be something about a successful religion that makes it long-lived. It need not be factual accuracy.

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SmartLX

The question is not how the sacred books could have spread without a mass revelation. The question is whether they needed a mass revelation to spread, when other “holy” books have spread just fine without.

A person says to another person, “Read this. It’ll save your soul.” The second person believes the first, and eventually does the same to more people. Meanwhile the first person keeps going.

All you need at the beginning is one convincing person, not hundreds. Think of all the cults, sects and full-blown religions which have started since then thanks to just one charismatic leader (Maharishi, L Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon).

Even if there was a mass revelation, within one lifetime all the believers were back to gaining new converts through second-hand accounts, with zero evidence. A mass revelation would have been a one-time boost, but it was far from necessary.

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logicel

My advice to this questioner is to take her/himself quickly, not to a nunnery (or a monastery), but to a course on critical thinking.

It is hard to take such a poorly thought-out question seriously, but I will do my best.

Can a story, that never happened, be passed on, from generation to generation? Yes, it can. (You were really unable to answer this question yourself!?)

Pleeeeeaaaseeee use basic thinking skills the next time you ask a question. And u r welcome!

Now that I got my snark out of the way, pleeeeeaaaseeee (oops, obviously a bit of snark remains) peruse this following quote from The God Delusion, p. 237:

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by HUNDREDS OF ANONYMOUS AUTHORS, EDITORS AND COPYISTS, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other spanning nine centuries.

To the basic wobbliness of biblical ‘knowledge,’ add to this mistyholological mess, that scholars can’t even agree on where Mount Sinai was/is!

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